Life and image archive of Seiichi Furuya interconnect with both the everyday life and the sociopolitical development of the former GDR, and especially with Dresden. To secure the livelihood of his young family, the young architect and photographer accepted to work as a translator for the Japanese construction company that built the Bellevue at the time, one of the first luxury hotels of the GDR, which still exists in the vicinity of the Kunsthaus today. Seen with the eyes of a photographer, who experiences and captures urban motifs characteristic for the historical situation at this very moment simultaneously with moments of intimacy, fear and happiness, Furuyas images provide a unique view of the ‘closed society’ of the socialist republic and daily life at the time in Dresden.

With its process of commemorating the life shared with his young family, embedded in the already palpable erosion of the GDR and the arduous loss of his wife Christine Gössler-Furuya after her suicide only a few month later in East-Berlin, Furuyas work challenges our understanding of individual and political history as well our notion of contemporariness in profound way.Was wir sehen. Dresden 1984 – 1985 at Kunsthaus Dresden with a comprehensive selection of in parts previously unpublished colour as well as black-and-white prints from the Dresden period, accompanied by all photographic books published as part of his work since 1978 as well asby the slide-installation Mémoires, presents the central work of Seiichi Furuya for the first time at its place of origination.